Center for Civic Media meetings start with an icebreaker question: you introduce yourself, and tell us whether you prefer pirates or ninjas, homemade or canned cranberry sauce. You offer your favorite protest chant or tell us what percent (“I am the 99%”) you identify with. Yesterday, on seeing two of Civic’s finest dressed in argyle, I asked people to propose a Civic Media dress code.
The suggestions were wide-ranging and included Jeff Warren’s suggestion of facial tattoos that serve as achievement badges, Nathan Matias’s proposed adoption of Madeline Albright’s “pin code” and Molly Sauter offered a suggestion for remixable, snarky t-shirts.
My favorite suggestion was Lorrie LeJeune’s proposal of a Civic media tartan. (Since Lorrie weaves and spins, as well as writes, edits, makes jewelry, builds guitars and plays mandolin, it’s possible she is weaving a Civic tartan right now.) It was widely observed that we needn’t select a single tartan – instead, we could create a set of tartans that functioned like QR codes, encoding information for anyone capable of comprehending the code.
I’m home sick today, feeling like the cold I’m fighting is perfectly justified given my travel and sleep schedule this fall. (Spontaneous human combustion would also likely have been an appropriate bodily response to the strains of this fall.) So I’ve had some time to think about how we might actually implement a Civic tartan code.
First, some quick comments on QR codes:
- They’re very cool. It’s wonderful that Densu Wave in 1994 figured out such a compact way to encode a surprisingly large amount of data into machine readable form. And there are certainly lots of clever ways to use them, not just for labeling auto parts, but for bridging between the real and digital worlds, tagging physical objects and spaces with unique identifiers and URLs. (See Civic’s Timenesia project for one cool way to use QR codes to tag reality.)
- They’re ugly as sin, and also something of a fashion statement. Commenting on posters from a recent Occupy rally, Sasha Constanza-Chock noted that QR codes on many of the posters and wondered – since most of the codes translate as URLs – whether it wouldn’t be easier simply to put the human-readable URLs on the posters instead. “It seems like the QR code primarily signifies you as the sort of person technologically sophisticated enough to be using QR codes”
There’s a certain charm to having codes that are machine-readable but not human readable, I guess – you can wear http://goatse.cx on your shirt and disturb anyone foolish enough to read the code with their phone. But I suspect fashion statements like haute couture bodices decorated with QR codes are the sort of idea with very little staying power.
- They’re killing kittens. As Scott Stratten explains in this helpful video, most QR codes are misused, and each time designers misuse them, a kitten dies. It’s time we think of the kittens.
Embedding data into physical spaces is a cool idea. But it would be great if we could do so in a way that’s pretty, and at least partially human readable.
Like tartans. Prior to the 19th century, tartans were associated with different regions of Scotland, colored using local dyes to local weaver’s preferences. After the publication of the (wholly fictional) Vestiarium Scoticum in 1842, tartans became associated with specific clans, and it became possible to identify members of some families by the particular tartan they wore. Military units and businesses have created specific tartans, as do most US states, and there are now between 7000 and 14,000 “registered” tartans available.
The Bay State tartan, my state’s official plaid. You may now understand why I prefer my clan tartan.
It’s pretty obvious from looking at a tartan that you’ve got the potential to store a great deal of information within the design of the pattern. The Bay State tartan features 24 stripes before repeating. Each can be a different width and color. With a couple dozen colors to choose from, and stripes ranging from one to 64 stitches, you’ve got 36,864 patterns, or slightly more than 15 bits of information. All well and good, but not enough information to encode a URL.
QR codes can include URLs stored as alphanumeric characters – the QR codes we see most often can support 35-77 alphanumeric characters. That’s a lot of data – ~8.9×10^108 possible combinations, which would require either really wide tartans, or very subtle color variations. The problem is more tractable if we try to represent a shortened URL, using a service like is.gd or bit.ly. Yes, this means our tartan scanner will need to detect color and stripe width, then consult bit.ly before using the domain name service to resolve our website… but remember, QR readers are using the DNS system to turn their codes into websites, in part because encoding IP addresses doesn’t work well anymore now that a site can support thousands of independent domains.
bit.ly produces URLs that look like this: http://bit.ly/t658ko – that URL leads to Center for Civic Media at http://civic.mit.edu. To slightly oversimplify, the service turns each URL it encounters into the next of a sequence of numbers. Rather than use decimal numbers, they use a base-62 system (0-9, A-Z, a-z), which allows them to represent almost 57 billion numbers with only six characters. 57 billion is vastly smaller than the total number of possible URLs, but in practical terms, it works because people haven’t used the service 57 billion times.
Now we just need something capable of producing 57 billion different tartans.
Enter Tartanmaker.com. This lovely online service allows you to design simple tartans to be used as backgrounds for your webpages. You can create three stripes of width from 1-10, using hexadecimal notation to specify colors. That gives you 167 million or so options per stripe (256^3 colors times 10 widths), or roughly 4.722 x 10^24 possible tartans. While that more than satisfies our information needs, most of those colors are going to be too subtle for the human eye to distinguish.
Turns out we can solve our problem using only websafe colors. With three stripes chosen from 216 websafe colors, we get almost 10 billion combinations. Tartanmaker offers us two other options – three thread widths (which basically scale the pattern) and two orientations (horizonal versus diagonal), which bring us up to over 59 billion combinations, just what we need to represent bit.ly URLs.
If we actually wanted to do this, we’d need a good algorithm to map bit.ly’s base-62 numbers to a combination of 3 thread sizes, 2 orientations, and three stripes, each of 216 colors and 10 widths. We might get very clever and figure out how to have tartans darken over time, using darker colors as we move through our list of unique identifiers. And we’d need Tartanmaker to offer an API so we could take an URL, call bit.ly, then call Tartanmaker and produce appropriate outputs. Finally, for this to actually be useful, we’d need to program a webcam to distinguish between color shades and stripe widths.
But it makes me deeply happy to know that Civic Media tartan could exist, and could lead an appropriately equipped smartphone to our site. And it makes me want to build a tartan translator, if only to figure out what URLs I’m advertising when I wear my flannel shirts.
One of my students at the Center for Civic Media and I were discussing the need for more conference venues for young speakers to share their ideas and polish their presentation skills. While TEDx has greatly expanded speaking opportunities, we felt that there was still more room to experiment with novel formats and extend the TED brand.
In the spirit of collaborative innovation, I posted a proposed new TED format to Twitter this morning:
Idea: TED Ex. Your former lovers have 18 minutes each to discuss your flaws, streamed live on the web.
While this would make for a short programme in my case, I suspect there are organizers who could convene an excellent roster of speakers around this theme. Indeed, one especially experienced respondent wondered whether the four-day conference format would be sufficient to accomodate all speakers he planned to invite.
Fortunately, the Twitter hivemind saw the wisdom of extending the TEDx format and have been posting suggestions to me directly, and using the #TEDHighConcept hashtag. I’ve collected some of the more promising ideas for your edification here.
@katecrawford @EthanZ TED SubteXt: Everyone will wonder what the speakers *really* meant.
Should any of these ideas prove viable as a future TED format, no need to share royalties – just send mainstage passes. We hope to offer more assistance in the future at the #TEDHighConcept hashtag.
Coulton isn’t signed to a record label, and while he’s currently producing a new studio album with John Flansburgh of the (legendarily geeky, major-label signed) They Might Be Giants, the music he’s best known for was recorded in a home studio on a Macintosh. He’s a prolific blogger and twitterer, and has a deep, intuitive understanding of geek culture, based in part on the fact that he spent nine years as a software developer, the day job to support his struggling music career. His big breaks have come, in part, through using geek culture as a springboard. His first “hit” was anthem to unrequited workplace love, Code Monkey, that was popularized in part through Slashdot. “Still Alive” was written for the closing credits of Portal, a mind-bending, thought-provoking video game that was a big underground hit.
Machinima music video of Coulton’s “Skullcrusher Mountain”, made using footage from World of Warcraft by Spiffworld
Alex Blumberg of Planet Money was interested in all of this, but he was especially interested in this simple but startling fact: Coulton took in roughly $500,000 in sales last year, and given that he’s got very low overhead, much of that money goes into his pocket. That makes him vastly more successful than most professional musicians, as Coulton has noted in the past. A few years back, he heard a story about the Dresden Dolls, a wonderfully creative band that played to large audiences and was signed to a major label (they’ve since broken up), but were only clearing enough profit to pay each of the two band members a “salary” of $1500 a month. Coulton observed on his blog, “They’re like, a real band with a label and everything. I make more than that, and I have no idea what I’m doing. How can this be?” (I wrote about this at some length in 2007.)
It’s very simple. The music industry, even in the days before digital distribution (legal and illegal) wasn’t a very good deal for most artists. Coulton’s managed to create a devoted fanbase that pay to see him at shows, buy downloads and CDs (even though his music is easy to find for free online), t-shirts and other swag. They help promote him by remixing his music (which is released under a Creative Commons license) and making music videos for his songs, which they post on YouTube. This is all a little bit remarkable. Given the internet savvy of the average Coulton fan, it’s certainly possible to pirate the entirity of the man’s repetoire. But fans show their love, in part, with money. I went to a Coulton show a couple of years back, and two of the folks I attended with – people who already had downloaded his entire oeuvre – purchased a $50 Coulton USB key, which included all the songs he’d released, plus separate audio tracks for remixers. (I bought one too, and gave it to Yochai Benkler as a tangible manifestation of the ideas he’s expressed in The Wealth of Networks.)
While Blumberg was clearly impressed by Coulton’s success and the creative ways he’s used the internet to forward his career, his guests, Jacob Ganz and Frannie Kelley from NPR Music, were more skeptical. Jacob opined that Coulton had hit the “lottery of the Internet”. Kelley described Coulton as a snuggie: “We didn’t know we wanted it, and then all of a sudden we did.” Coulton’s model, they argued, wasn’t replicable – it worked well for him, but struggling artists would be ill advised to follow his path, as it would be unlikely to work for them.
Coulton has responded with an eloquent and passionate essay urging Ganz and Kelley to lighten up on the snark and engage a bit more deeply in the analysis. Obsessing over the quirkiness of Coulton’s material and characterizing his success as a fluke may miss a bigger point about how the music industry has changed in an age of digital distribution and social media. “There are plenty of artists making music and using unique and creative promotional techniques to sell it directly to fans (say it with me, won’t you?): Trent Reznor, Radiohead, Amanda Palmer, Paul and Storm, Marian Call, OK Go, MC Frontalot, MC Lars, the list goes on and on and gets larger every day,” Coulton expands. He happens to have had enough success with this alternative model that he makes for an interesting news story… but only if you take seriously the idea that his success is at least as much about figuring out how to intelligently use social media as it is about luck.
Something about Ganz and Kelley’s analysis of Coulton’s success reminded me of the journalists versus blogger debate of the past decade, where professional journalists would grudgingly acknowledge an important story broken by a blogger – the apparently partisan firing of US Attorneys, investigated by TPM Muckraker, for example – and then remind their audience that these stories were exceptional. Flukes. Generally speaking, they’d argue, we need professional journalists to break news. Bloggers are mostly parasitic, the argument continues, but they might help with opinion, occasional fact checking, or the lucky first photo when news breaks somewhere unexpected.
I hear that position expressed a whole lot less often these days. Large, reputable journalistic organizations are relying heavily on citizen media to diversify and broaden their coverage, especially in places where it’s hard to report from the ground (see my article for Daedalus, “International Reporting in the Age of Participatory Media“). The debates I hear now are less about making a place for citizen media in the newsroom, and more about figuring out how to do it well, especially as concerns issues of verifiability and creative curation. Citizen media is now part of the professional newsroom – how big or small a part is largely a function of the talent and skills of the people building these new newsrooms.
Here’s the thing – professional journalists create an important public good that most people acknowledge needs to be preserved in a digital age. We may disagree on how newspapers and broadcast media will sustain themselves in the future, but most people in the debate like journalism and journalists and want professional news to survive.
Who wants record labels to survive? Is anyone going to cry when the last A&R man is fired?
My prediction: in five years, the sorts of techniques Coulton and others are using to promote their music will be embraced, to one degree or another, by whatever record labels remain in business. Some will embrace the whole ethos Coulton espouses, offering variable pricing and encouraging their artists to have real, meaningful interactions with fans, while others will hire social media consultants and put a thin patina of interactivity on a broken old business model. Vastly more artists will be following in Coulton’s footsteps in their own ways, whether it’s encouraging remix, releasing under Creative Commons or maintaining personal relationships with fans. As with Coulton, these artists may not become household names, but they’ll be important to their fan bases, and some will make enough money to do this for a living, perhaps more than today.
On a higher part of the beach, a single patio chair of molded white plastic commanded a wide view. Someone might have put it there to enjoy a beer in, or for winter sunbathing. Then again, it might have been flotsam. I have seen this identical type of plastic chair in photos of the Lagos, Nigeria, city dumps in the Times. A photo of a memorial gathering for a slain Al Qaeda leader in Jordan showed a row of these same chairs in a tent. I own six of these chairs myself. I believe this type of white molded-plastic chair belongs to the growing category of the world’s ubiquitous objects.
His observation stuck with me, and I found myself searching through photos I’ve taken around the world in my travels, searching for the plastic chair. It is, indeed, ubiquitous.
In Abuja, Nigeria, they’re not just furniture – they’re key stage props for a dancer who balances plates, trays, tables and chairs on his body while executing full splits.
I started to think that perhaps I’d start collecting images of white plastic chairs, when I discovered that I’d been beaten to the punch… many, many times over.
One of the contributors to the Flickr group is Jens Thiel, from whom I learned the correct nomenclature for the chair in question. It’s a plastic Monobloc chair, named because it’s a single piece of polypropylene (mono-block), heated to to 220 degrees centigrade and extruded into a mold that can produce chairs every 70 seconds. Monoblocs are produced throughout the world, in China, Taiwan, the US, Israel, Mexico and elsewhere. At roughly $3 a piece, it’s easy to understand how they’ve become so pervasive.
Thiel maintains a website and a Facebook page dedicated to the Monobloc. The site features everything from an examination of creative ways the Monobloc is repaired in countries where it’s too expensive to replace, to numerous art pieces that feature the Monobloc. My favorite artistic interpretations include a beautifully morbid chair by pool called “souviens toi que tu vas mourir” and a fantastically subversive piece called “white billion chairs 33” by Tina Roeder. Roeder’s piece features a pile of chairs each perforated with up to 10,000 holes, rendering them beautiful but totally non-functional.
I don’t have strong feelings about whether the Monobloc is an object of beauty or a target for derision… though I’d suggest that any design as successful as the Monobloc has proved its evolutionary worth. What I’m intrigued by is the idea that the Monobloc is a context-free object.
To explain what I mean:
Fifteen years ago, one of my jobs at Tripod was managing our abuse and legal teams. With several million webpages hosted on our service, some of them violated our terms of service and hosted pornography. That wasn’t a bit problem – we deleted pages that violated our TOS. But when we encountered pages that might be hosting child pornography, we had a more complicated procedure. We copied files to floppy disk (remember, it was 1996!) and mailed them to our regional FBI office, along with information on the IP address the user in question had signed up from.
One of the best guys on my team went to Boston for a week to train to become a “confidential informant”, so he could testify if we’d found evidence in a child pornography case that went to court. Curious guy that he was, he asked whether the information we were providing – the IP address signed up from – was helpful in building cases. Sure, he was told, but not as useful as the information in the photos. Almost every detail in a photo held information about the time and location the photo was taken. The shape of electrical outlets, labels on any consumer products, fabrics, clothing all were clues as to whether a photo was taken in the 1970s or last week, in Sweden or Schenectady.
Virtually every object suggests a time and place. The Monobloc is one of the few objects I can think of that is free of any specific context. Seeing a white plastic chair in a photograph offers you no clues about where or when you are. I have a hard time thinking of other objects that are equally independent of context. Asking friends to propose a similar object, most people suggest a Coke can… but I can tell you that Coke is presented very differently in different countries, in glass bottles as well as cans, with labels in local languages. The Monobloc offers no linguistic cues, no obvious signs that it’s been localized. Wherever you are, it’s at home.
For me, the Monobloc isn’t so much a glimpse of the future, where we suspect that mega-corporation will blur distinctions between Albania and Afghanistan. Even McDonalds, the avatar for global homogenization, makes heavy investments in localization. if it didn’t, it would be very hard to sell beef burgers in majority-Hindu India. It’s going to be a while before McChicken Tikka (an excellent sandwich, by the way) is so pervasive that its wrapper doesn’t reveal that you’re at an Indian McDonalds, not a Japanese one.
The Monobloc is a reminder that the world is still filled with the local, the unique, the distinctive. Globalization may be homogenizing the world, but most objects still offer some context. The few objects that defy localization deserve some special form of lionization. They’ve achieved a level of design perfection where they don’t require adaptation to be as successful in Africa as they are in suburban America. Dismiss them at your peril – context-free objects like the Monobloc have achieved a sort of global celebrity that few humans could ever hope for.
There’s a new, must-watch online video, “The Three Big Pigs”, that uses the wonderfully addictive mobile game Angry Birds to comment on political change in the Middle East… and American involvement in that change. It was featured today on online gamer community Kotaku, and it’s just the sort of clever, funny video that I suspect will go viral.
The Kotaku story doesn’t mention the author of the piece, but it’s brilliant Russian designer Egor Zhgun (Егор Жгун). Zhgun has a long track record of using popular culture remix to address political issues. His LiveJournal site is loaded with remixed movie posters, book covers and other pop culture artifacts. Many of the remixes rely on knowledge of Russian politics that are above my head, while others are more international in scope, like this issue of Kosvopolitan. (If this doesn’t make sense, it may be useful to remember that American enthusiasm for an independent Kosovo wasn’t shared by the whole rest of the world, and particularly upset people in countries with strong ties to Serbia.)
For the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, the Russian Olympic committee has involved the general public in designing and choosing the mascots for the game. This process became more than a little political when people began pointing out the similarities between one of the mascots – a polar bear – and the mascot of the 1980 Olympics… and the logo of the ruling United Russia party. Russian president Dmitri Medvedev (whose surname includes the Russian word for “bear”, “medved”), threw his public support behind the bear against competitors like a snow leopard and a hare, and apparently swung the results of the election.
Zhgun decided to design his own mascot, Zoich, and participate in the contest. The name derives from reading the year “2014″ as a mix of Roman and Cyrillic characters and offering an approximate pronunciation. The creature itself is a reworking of the Hypnotoad from Futurama, as is the slogan. You can read this as Zhgun “ripping off” the Futurama character, or as remixing – given Zhgun’s track record of creative remix, and the emergence of Hyptotoad as a remixed internet meme, I think a more charitable reading is warranted.
Zoich was entered in the mascot contest, and quickly became a rallying point for the opposition, who saw the cute polar bear as a clear symbol of the ruling government. He wasn’t selected, but he is clearly visible on the front page of the web page featuring the official Sochi mascots (in a portrait hanging on the wall between the rabbit and snow leopard). Perhaps the contest organizers were happy that Zoich caught favor rather than some of Zhgun’s alternatives – in an interview with Zhgun on Lenta.ru, several other possible mascots make their appearance, including a reworking of Pedobear into a mascot.
There’s something very 2011 about a Russian video using a soundtrack from American cartoons and characters from a Finnish mobile phone game (based on an English fairytale) to satirize North African politics. (Whether Disney will choose to engage in some legal actions across national borders, as Zhgun is using audio from the 1932 short “Three Little Pigs” remains to be seen.)
Clearly, Angry Birds has become a cross-cultural touchstone, a piece of popular culture that you can assume a viewer has familiarity with no matter their national origin. Before seeing Zhgun’s video, my favorite Angry Birds “remix” came from Israeli television show Eretz Nehederet (“It’s a Wonderful Country”), which uses the game to satirize Israeli/Palestinian tensions and endless peace talks.
I’m excited to see the lulz crossing national borders, and happy to see Russian satire getting love from Internet users around the world. But it’s also very 2011 to see cool ideas spread with little credit to their originators. So enjoy Three Big Pigs, and spend a moment or two checking out the rest of Zhgun’s work – it would be exciting to see him get some love outside the Russian blogosphere.
Someone on Twitter pointed me to Damn You Auto Correct, a site that’s at least as narrow in focus as your average LOLCats site, but pretty funny nevertheless. I suppose it’s useful mostly as a warning not to invite someone over for gelato unless you’ve really thought things through. Then again, anyone who’s listened to Benjamen Walker’s 13th episode of Too Much Information, where an innocuous text message to a notoriously cranky rock star is transformed into a curt insult by autocorrect. Suffice it to say, I’ve never since typed “NP. Thanks so much” on my iPhone again.
It does seem like the manufacturers of autocorrect should keep up with the times in editing their dictionaries, realizing that “NP” has become pretty common slang and to find a different way to correct misspellings without alienating quick-fingered radio producers and SMSing computer scientists. And then I remembered a routine from British comics Armstrong and Miller:
The key phrase for me: “Our job, Gilbert, is to offer people not the words they do use but the words they should use.”
The 2010 FIFA World Cup starts on Friday, which means that football fans across the world have a difficult task this week: determining who to support.
At first glance, this doesn’t seem to be a difficult task – contrarians aside, we support our national sides. But that’s not much help if your nation didn’t qualify… unless, like Ireland, you didn’t qualify in a way that gives you a team to root against throughout the tournament. And even if you have ties to one or more nations who’ll be competing, there are dozens of qualifying matches where you’ve got no direct rooting interest. Assuming you’re neither South African or Mexican, who do you pull for in the opener Friday afternoon?
A Wikipedia map of countries competing in the 2010 Cup. Countries in green will be competing. Countries in red failed to qualify. Laos and the Philippines, in purple, are members of FIFA, but did not compete in this year’s qualifiers. And Western Sahara and Greenland (along with smaller states like San Marino and the Vatican City) aren’t FIFA members.
Poking around on various football discussion boards and on friends’ blogs, I’ve seen several strategies proposed.
Strategic support If the goal of the World Cup is for your national team, – or the team you’re most passionate about – to win, the key is for the rest of the most talented nations to lose. If I’m supporting Ghana (and I am, as well as the US), I’m not just pulling for Ghana to get past Serbia and Australia, I’m supporting Algeria to get through in group C rather than England, in the hopes that I get an easier round of 16 match. Carry this method to its logical extent and you find yourself pulling for New Zealand and North Korea in the hopes for a cakewalk of a final. Not necessarily the prettiest of methods.
Support through spite An excellent strategy for supporters of nations who really should have made it into the tournament. I suspect many Irish fans will support any team playing France in any match… which is likely to give them someone to support through at least the quarterfinals. You can combine this method with strategic support and support teams most likely to defeat the team you most loathe… Still, is it really satisfying to support Germany in the hopes that they’ll smash the hated French/Italians/pick your nemesis?
Non-FIFA support If you support a Champions League club, there’s a good chance you can coast through the tournament supporting national teams that feature your club players. As such, many Barça fans are supporting Spain (a surprise to me, given Catalan nationalism) and Argentina, as a chance to support the sublime Messi. This strategy has obvious flaws, though, when players on your club side are on both sides of a WC match.
Aesthetic considerations Certain teams are just more fun to watch than others. Watching Dutch total football is more enjoyable, in my opinion, than Italian total gridlock. Add in the joy of watching certain players perform and you can add Argentina and Cameroon to aesthetically pleasing teams like Brazil and Spain. The risk of this method? Becoming one of those smug football fans who says, “Oh, I don’t care who wins – I just want to see the most beautiful game possible.” Yeah, right. The most beautiful game is the one in which the team I support unexpectedly trounces an aesthetically superior team.
Outside considerations I suspect this is the method most of us use to decide who to support in matches like Paraguay/Slovakia – are there outside associations with either nation that lead to a rooting interest? If you can’t come up with any associations with either Paraguay or Slovakia, MetroUK has a charming “neutrals” guide that offers largely irrelevant reasons you can use to support or oppose any of the 32 teams. And if you’re an NFL football fan with no connections to global football, there are at least twoguides helpfully aligning World Cup teams with NFL teams. Of course, if you’re rooting for South Korea because some blogger thinks their speed and precision parallel the Green Bay Packers, you’ve probably got other problems.
Algorithmic support I’ve always admired systematic thinkers, so I have a certain respect for anyone who’s able to put together a set of rules that allow them to make a decision for who to support in any match. Next Left offers a simple version of an algorithmic strategy – support the teams whose nations have democratic left governments – but realizes that this leads to first round conflicts like Brazil versus Portugal. More sophisticated algorithms have multiple tiers – my friend Alaa once outlined a strategy that involved supporting his native Egypt, then Arab nations, then African nations, then supporting colonies over the colonizers. (Indeed, I’m writing this post in part in the hopes that I can provoke him to outline his full algorithm.)
As for me, I’m an algorithmic sort of guy, with flashes of nationalism and aesthetic concerns. So my football strategy looks something like this:
- Sub-Saharan African teams get my support, especially Ghana, recognizing that it’s looking like a tough tournament for the African sides.
- Developing world over developed.
- Pretty football over ugly – Argentina, Spain, Brazil, Netherlands over Italy, Germany, England.
- Places I’ve been to over those I’ve never visited, with quality of national cuisine as a tiebreaker.
- Bonus points for truly unlikely teams, including NZ and North Korea.
- I’ll root for the US until they face Ghana. At that point, I’ll probably support Ghana, if only so there’s some conflict when watching with US friends.
In other words, I see your arbitrary and raise you ludicrous and illogical. And yes, I’ll be supporting South Africa over Mexico, despite my love for bistec encebollada and distaste for sadza.
If you’re inclined, I’d love to hear how you’re strategizing about who to support, especially if you’d blogged about your personal algorithms. I’m hoping to write a piece for Global Voices on this strategy, so I’m especially interested if you’ve already posted something I can link to…
Nigerian-American blogger/photographer/author Teju Cole was responsible for one of my favorite portraits of the 2006 World Cup – he watched each match, selecting a different restaurant or bar in New York City or New Jersey affiliated with one of the competing sides. This year, he’s repeating the experiment along with blogger Siddhartha Mitter. If you’ve read Cole’sEvery Day is For the Thief, you know the wit, insight and poetry you’re in for. I look forward to seeing “the Mundial” through his eyes, and to learning from him where I can find Paraguayan food in the greater New York area.
An audio version of danah and my keynote is now available for download online. I recommend a background of lolcats – preferably multilingual ones – as you listen.
I gave a dozen public talks last month, and it’s possible that ROFLCon was the most intimidating of the bunch. I was asked by Tim Hwang, internet researcher (and Berkman Center affiliate) co-founder of The Awesome Foundation and of ROFLCon, to kick off the event by co-keynoting with (dear friend) danah boyd. danah actually works in the deep swamps of contemporary internet culture, so ROFLCon – a conference that takes both a loving and scholarly look at the phenomenon of internet memes – is close to home turf for her. I, on the other hand, tend to study things like the impact of cellphones in political organizing in the developing world, and wondered if there was any possible way to connect the sort of issues I work on with a conference that featured Mahir Cagri (of I Kiss You fame), the owner and videographer of Keyboard Cat and the author of Garfield Minus Garfield.
Turns out I was underestimating ROFLCon. Yes, there were panels where the main question seemed to be, “What’s it like to be a microcelebrity”… which may have included the panel danah and I moderated. And yes, there’s nothing to make you feel old and decrepit like walking into a panel where you don’t know a single one of the internet memes being celebrated. (No, I’d never heard of cornify. No, my world has not been substantially broadened by listening to their founder, wearing a unicorn mask, discuss vampires.) On the other hand, the panel on race – I can haz dream? – was one of the best conference panels I’ve ever attended. (If any network execs are reading this blog, let me just point out that a late night show based around Baratunde Thurston and Christian Lander would kill.) And many of the people at the conference seemed to be deeply engaged in the sorts of issues danah and I were talking about – Who creates internet culture? Whose voices are amplified and whose aren’t? What happens when marginal, weird cultures become mainstream?
It’s not easy being an academic at a conference like ROFLCon. The stars are the folks who’ve done something wonderful, weird, unforgetable, or so wonderfully weird it’s unforgetable. Those of us who are trying to make observations about the field feel a little like musicologists studying Bach – we can study his compositions exhaustively, but we’re acutely aware that we’re not going to write a mighty fugue. No matter how much I might study internet memes, I know I’m never going to accomplish something as majestic as keyboard cat… and I have to live with that truth every day of my life.
Unlike danah who can actually tell you something about internet culture, I study information in the developing world. Basically, I’m interested in the question of whether the internet, mobile phones and community radio can make people healthier, wealthier and more free.
If you work in this field for very long, you’ll end up realizing that the basic question behind development economics is “Why are some people rich and other people poor?” There are better and worse answers to these questions. Some of the smartest answers focus on which parts of the world had animals and plants that were easily domesticated and which had endemic diseases. Other smart answers look at the ways in which colonialism held back development or look at the problems of bad governance and persistent conflict. Bad answers to the questions focus on the idea that some people are inherently, biologically smarter than others. This idea – “scientific racism” – surfaces throughout history, as the basis for eugenics and more recently in psuedo-scientific analyses of IQ scores.
If you’d like to understand just what a stinking heap of bullshit scientific racism theories are, I recommend spending some time in very poor nations. You’ll discover that many of the people you meet display extraordinary creativity as they navigate the challenges of everday survival. And you’ll start learning about people like William Kamkwamba, whose near death from famine in Malawi didn’t prevent him from building a fiendishly ingenious power-generating windmill from an old bicycle and some recycled PVC pipe.
My time in the developing world suggests to me that intelligence, creativity and humor are evenly distributed throughout the world. People’s ability to express their intelligence, creativity and humor – and our ability to encounter said traits – are heavily geographically constrained, but the basic distribution is near constant.
All of which leads us to the question at hand today: Daddy, where do memes come from? I suspect Drew will be asking me this question any day now, due to Rachel and my egregious tendency to misuse Cafe Press and the fact that we gave him the middle name “Wynn” in part so we could title his blog “For the Wynn“. In answering these questions, I find that I’m usually referring to Randall Munroe’s brilliant Online Communities map, and to the fertile equatorial regions that extend from the Gulf of YouTube through the Ocean of Subculture. Within this region, there are areas whose soils – turned black with the charring of endless flamewars – are especially fertile for the cultivation of new memes. (sup, /b/?)
I’m interested in mapping memes in a different way. Here’s a quick and dirty map of internet memes extracted from Know Your Meme. Yes, the US and Japan dominate global memetics (or, at least, they do based on the site, which has its own – recognized, now being addressed – cultural biases). But there’s a huge number of memes coming from almost all corners of the globe.
In development economics, we pay special attention to the so-called BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China – who we expect to become increasingly important over the next few decades due to their large populations, natural resources and rates of economic growth. And so we shouldn’t be surprised to find distinctly regional memes emerging from each of these countries – I offer as a gallery of superheroes Brother Sharp from China, Golimar from India, Glazastik from Russia and the legion that is Tenso from Brazil. You may not know who these viral wonders are, but the people who live in these rapidly developing nations do.
Assume I’m right and that creativity has a near-constant distribution. Assume also that access to the internet continues its explosive spread. The inescapable conclusion is that the next wave of internet memes is going to come from the developing world.
It’s already happening – I just watched the first major Kenyan internet meme come to life. The Nairobi-based band called “Just a Band” released a video for a song called “Ha-He” off their new album. The video’s absurdly good – it’s shot by the guys in the band, and it introduces a new superhero: Makmende.
Actually, “Makmende Amerudi” means “Makmende has returned”… “Makmende” was what you called a kid in the neighborhood in Kenyan in the 1990s who wanted to be Bruce Lee. I heard it and assumed that it was a sheng word – “sheng” is the blend of Swahili and English that’s Kenya’s unofficial national language – turns out that “Makmende” is what happens when Kenyans say “Go ahead, make my day”.
So Makmende kicks the ass of all comers in this video, gets the girl… who he promptly ignores, and spouts some incomprehensible but pithy aphorisms. This video went crazy in the Kenyan blogosphere – which is an extremely creative space – and we started seeing Makmende magazine covers, a 10,000 shilling note and lots of video remixes.
Above, we see a local television reporter come to a rapid and bad end when he has the misfortune of finding Makmende’s house… in sort of a Nairobi version of the Blair Witch project. And yes, Hitler’s upset about Makmende as well… But the best stuff actually has pretty low production values – it’s the website aggregating the sort of Makmende one-liners that shot across Twitter for a week or so after the video became popular. Sure, lots of the content here could have appeared on Chuck Norris Facts, but much of what’s there is indigenous to Kenya, and may not make sense if you’re not Kenyan.
Makmende’s so badass that he raises two philosophical questions for me. The first is, “Who gets to decide what’s a meme?”
Brilliant and funny lexicographer Erin McKean tells us that new worlds enter the language because people love them enough to use them. Lexicographers aren’t the bouncers at the language club; they’re anthropologists, discovering and documenting how language gets used. This is clearly how memes work as well – if people adopt it, love it and transform, it’s a meme… and what anyone else says doesn’t matter.
But it sure as hell helps if it ends up in Wikipedia. Getting Makmende into Wikipedia was one of the first things Kenyans tried to do… and getting things into Wikipedia is a lot harder than it used to be. The article was deleted a couple of times before the authors realized that they needed to make the case that Makmende was Kenya’s first major internet meme, which made it notable. It hasn’t made it into Know Your Meme yet – it was summarily deadpooled when last submitted.
My hope is that all of us who are interested in internet culture can be anthropologists, not bouncers. Yes, not everything that gets posted online is worthy of our study and amplification… but it’s worth keeping in mind that we sometimes don’t understand the unfamiliar at first and would find it intensely cool if we took a bit more time to try and understand it.
My second question is: “Who gets to play along with an internet meme?” On the one hand, there’s not much preventing you from adding some Makmende facts to the mix. On the other hand, a lot of the funny stuff already posted doesn’t make much sense unless you know the language and the culture. “Makmende hangs his clothes on a Safaricom line” only is funny if you know that Safaricom is Kenya’s largest mobile phone company and doesn’t have any traditional phone lines.
My sense is that most memes don’t cross between cultures because we don’t understand the language, don’t understand the references or weren’t paying attention to that corner of the internet to start with. Those that do tend to be funny in a way that’s independent of language. The Back Dorm Boys are pretty funny, and it’s not hard to figure out how to join in the fun.
This question parallels one that internet scholars are spending a lot of time on: Do we have one internet or many? When a country like China heavily censors their internet and encourages the growth of a parallel internet, do we hit a point where it just doesn’t make sense to talk about “the internet” anymore? Perhaps we’ve got to talk about internets, and how they interconnect. And if 340 million Chinese internet users look mostly at Chinese sites, laugh at Chinese memes, maybe it makes sense that the Chinese internet will eventually run on its own protocols, which might make it easier to censor or control. Go far enough down this road and you can imagine diverging internets, each trying to best meet the needs of their users, and no longer having a world where we readily peer into each other’s internets.
If we care about a single, united internet, it is imperative that we develop, discover and disseminate internet memes that we can laugh at together. When governments censor political sites on the internet, they alienate the small portion of their populations who already identify as politically dissident – and they can make the case that they’re protecting their citizens from terrorism or incitement to violence or pornography. But when they block our access to videos of cats flushing toilets, we see them for the heavy-handed bullies that they are. The cute cats serve as cover traffic for more serious political speech – so long as chinese users want to laugh at our cat videos, we’re encouraging people to circumvent censorship and potentially encounter all sorts of stuff on YouTube.
The Chinese have developed cute cat technology. Even a cursory glance at Youku shows that the once apparently insurmountable cat gap has been thoroughly bridged. And not just simple cute cats – Youku features cats flushing toilets! And not just western style toilets – squat toilets as well! If we accept my assertion that it’s politically critical for us to LOL together, we need not just to be studying Chinese net memes – we need to develop memes we can LOL at across cultures.
When we cross cultural borders in internet memespace, we’re usually laughing at someone else. Engrish, funny though it is, is basically the act of laughing at someone for failing to speak your (absurdly complex and irregular) mother tongue. I’m deeply impressed with people like Mahir Ça?r? who managed to turn the experience of being laughed at by the entire internet into laughing along with the joke. It takes an unusual personality to pull this off – I’m not sure that laughing at and inviting folks to laugh along is always the best way to go.
I’d rather take the example of Matt Harding, the video game developer who spent years travelling the world, dancing badly. After the success of his first video, Matt discovered that the piece of music he’d used – “Sweet Lullaby” by Deep Forest – had a problematic history. The very short version – the French musicians behind Deep Forest used a lullaby from the Solomon Islands to record their hit song, without seeking permission from the woman who sang the song and over the explicit objections of the musicologist who recorded it. Worse, they presented it in such a way that most listeners thought it came from central Africa, not from the south Pacific.
Matt could have dismissed this story as an ugly footnote to his adventures with internet fame. To his great credit, he didn’t. Instead, he went to Auki, a small town in the Solomon Islands, to interview a nephew of Afunakwa, the woman who’d recorded the original song. It was his way of apologizing for the complex past of the song, and his way of using the weirdness of internet fame to make his world – and all those of us who’ve watched the video – a little wider.
My conclusions?
- We can go from weird to wide, as Matt did, using the strange and quirky corners of the internet to prod us into curiosity
- It’s worth asking ourselves if we’re laughing at, or laughing with. And if we don’t like the answer, perhaps we need to change our behavior.
- Anthropologists are cooler than bouncers.
- If we don’t laugh at Chinese internet memes – the first step towards getting Chinese users to laugh at global memes – the censors win.
- “Erinaceous” is a totally awesome word.
Highlights of presenting the talk included:
- Co-presenting with danah, which encouraged significantly sillier behavior than I generally engage in when on stage. I’d like to believe that I would always be willing to crouch behind a podium wearing a fluffy red hat before delivering a keynote… but it’s just not true. Add danah to the mix and it suddenly is.
- Matt Harding jumping up when his name was mentioned and dancing in the audience. I’m thankful that he came on stage after the talk to introduce himself and apologize if I freaked him out by spontaneously hugging him. I just think he’s wicked cool and deserves recognition for using the internet to show us (one facet of) how wide and wonderful the world can be.
- Meeting Mahir, who turns out to be utterly lovely in person. Yes, he immediately started filming our meeting via flip video and digital camera, and yes, he did invite me, my wife and infant son to visit him in Izmir… but I got the sense that it wasn’t in any way an act, just his particular version of friendliness. It felt more wonderful than weird.
- Talking with the guys from Know Your Meme, who are working really hard to ensure that their site is global and inclusive, and who are trying to take some pages from the Global Voices playbook, recruiting local editors who understand memes in their corners of the world. I’ve got high hopes of a Makmende article in development soon, and hope perhaps for a GV/KYM alliance where we source and research global memes.
In other words, I had a blast. Thanks to everyone involved and hope you had as much fun as I did.
“They once made a makmende toilet paper, but there was a problem: It wouldn’t take shit from anybody!!!”
“Makmende hangs his clothes on a safaricom line and when they dry he stores them in a flashdisk!”
If those simple truths don’t make sense to you, you’re probably not a Kenyan blogger. For the past few days, Kenya’s blogosphere and twitterers have been in thrall to the latest African superhero, and what might be Kenya’s first viral internet meme. An article in a Wall Street Journal blog today confirmed that Makmende is receiving attention beyond East Africa, demonstrating that our Kenyan friends are just as capable as any Moldovan boy band of creating internet buzz.
The video for Just a Band’s single “Ha-He” features a badass protagonist straight out of blaxploitation films. Armed with an array of freeze-frame kung fu moves, Makmende brings justice to the mean streets of a hazy, sun-drenched city that seems caught somewhere between Nairobi and 1970s LA. Tongue is firmly in cheek, as the video credits introduce characters including “Taste of Daynjah”, “Wrong Number” and bad guys “The Askyua Matha Black Militants”.
Makmende was a term used way back in the early to mid 1990s to refer to someone who thinks he’s a superhero. For example, if a boy who’s watched one too many kung-fu movies on TV decides to unleash his newly acquired combat skills, he would be asked “Unajidai Makmende, eh?” (Who do you think you are, Makmende?) Trust me, there was a Makmende in every hood!
Given the high production values of the video, the fact that it accompanies a sweet track from Just a Band, and that the video producers evidently released a set of photoshopped magazine covers featuring Makmende as GQ’s sole “Badass of the Year”, perhaps it’s not surprising that Kenyan netizens have taken the Makmende trend to the next level. He’s got a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and a dedicated website filled with thousands of testimonies to his badassitude: “Makmende uses viagra in his eyedrops, just to look hard.”
The obvious parallel is Chuck Norris Facts, an internet meme that manifested mostly through image macros that attest to the action star’s manliness. (“Chuck Norris counted to infinity. Twice.”) For now, the Makmende phenomenon appears to be largely text-based, with Kenyans around the world connecting the events of the day to Makmende’s movements: “is the massive pour in Nairobi as a result of Makmende’s tear after the WSJ feature?”
What he doesn’t have is a Wikipedia page. I searched this morning on the English-language Wikipedia and got a page telling me that Makmende had been deleted:
* 00:37, 24 March 2010 Flyguy649 (talk | contribs) deleted “Makmende” ? (CSD G3: Pure Vandalism)
* 22:53, 23 March 2010 Malik Shabazz (talk | contribs) deleted “Makmende” ? (G12: Unambiguous copyright infringement (CSDH))
* 18:30, 23 March 2010 JoJan (talk | contribs) deleted “Makmende” ? (G1: Patent nonsense, meaningless, or incomprehensible)
Looks like multiple attempts to establish a Makmende page have been shot down. Fair enough – the inclusionist/deletionist argument that’s gripped Wikipedia centers in part on the documentation of ephemeral culture. Perhaps an English language encyclopedia doesn’t need mention of every internet meme… though pages exist for Numa Numa, the song that inspired the viral video, the guy who performed in the viral video, and so on. Perhaps if Makmende reaches the heights of internet fame that memes like Eduard Khil or Back Dorm Boys have achieved, he’ll no longer be “patent nonsense, meaningless or incomprehensible.”
Here’s an interesting puzzle for Wikipedia. Makmende may never become particularly important to English speaking users outside of Kenya. But the phenomenon’s quite important within the Kenyan internet: it’s the first meme I can remember going truly viral and inspiring a wave of participation from Kenyans around the world. I recall a conversation at 2006 Wikimania in Cambridge where (friend and GV editor) Ndesanjo Macha, a major contributor to the Swahili Wikipedia, explained that the topics covered in that wikipedia were likely to be different from those included in the English wikipedia. (More articles on east African culture, less on Pokemon, perhaps.) Indeed, the Wikipedias in Gaelic, Welsh and Plattdüütsch are cultural projects as much as attempts to make key reference materials available, as most speakers of these languages are fluent in other languages that have much larger Wikipedias.
Most Wikipedians seemed to accept the idea that different languages and cultures might want to include different topics in their encyclopedias. But what happens when we share a language but not a culture? Is there a point where Makmende is sufficiently important to English-speaking Kenyans that he merits a Wikipedia page even if most English-speakers couldn’t care less? Or is there an implicit assumption that an English-language Wikipedia is designed to enshrine landmarks of shared historical and cultural importance to people who share a language?
For me, Makmende’s a reminder that the internet isn’t as small and connected as we tend to believe it is. We occasionally catch glimpses over cultural walls when we use these tools. Sometimes we respond with fascination and seek to learn more. Often, our behavior’s not as admirable. danah boyd closed her talk on Digital Visibility at Supernova this past year with an uncomfortable observation about racism in Twitter:
Think of those who complained when the Trending Topics on Twitter reflected icons of the black community during the Black Entertainment Television awards. Tweets like: “wow!! too many negros in the trending topics for me. I may be done with this whole twitter thing.” and “Did anyone see the new trending topics? I don’t think this is a very good neighborhood. Lock the car doors kids.” and “Why are all the black people on trending topics? Neyo? Beyonce? Tyra? Jamie Foxx? Is it black history month again? LOL”. These tweets should send a shiver down your spine. Perhaps these people assumed that Twitter was a white-dominant space where blacks were welcome only if they were a minority.
danah goes on to point out that not everyone reacts to encountering topics outside of their comfort sphere with shock or surprise. I found it encouraging that the Wall Street Journal saw the emergence of a Kenyan meme as a chance to explore Kenyan internet culture rather than to turn away in ignorance or disinterest. Let’s hope the next time Makmende seeks a place in Wikipedia, he’s met with a bit more curiosity and less dismissal.
Web Seer is a beautiful illustration of the ways in which search engines are becoming a reflection of our collective unconscious. My friends Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg took advantage of Google’s “suggested search” feature, which offers common searches when you begin typing a phrase. “How can I” quickly prompts you with “lose 10 pounds in a week”, “help Haiti” and “get pregnant”. Playing with the feature, many people have discovered that the results can be different and revealing when you change the wording of questions. (Comparing “is my wife” and “is my husband” is particularly stark.) Web Seer allows you to compare two searches quickly, and shows where the two overlap.
I was thinking about the Google in China situation last week and wondering whether there was any truth to the “Google as a new superpower” narrative. Web Seer tells me that the future’s even more dramatic and bleak:
